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The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Notes on Anjet Daanje’s “The Remembered Soldier”

    And the writing flows a river full of war debris rusted and mute but on the banks dogs run and flowers spread and lovers lay their heads on one another’s laps and lie about who they are where they come from and where they’re going and the lies while self-serving and might sting antiseptically clean and heal at least for a time carry the possibility of being true.

    And they talk about the war now closed but not yet about a new one the war effects strewn everywhere infiltrating past present and future families businesses and churches and all about wander widows looking for their lost soldiers waiting for word from somewhere news information findings photographs posed or improvised letters particularly the one written and stuffed in their uniform pocket should someone find their poor dogsbody adrift adirt now on the still dug tide pull it out and mail it for them.

    And they get up and light the coal burner and make chicory coffee and no one calls it ersatz and the children are off to school and play as if there never was a war nor any worries outside the sounds they might hear in the middle of the night suggesting something is near some memory being ground up in noir dogged dreams and the writing becomes a horror story the war is a horror and the memory of it if there is one even if all you got was a whiff of it is a horrible stench and touch of a trench full of the unspeakable yet again it doesn’t take long and the flowers begin their cover scent and one is thankful for a period or two and a rest however brief.

    And one need not go to war to forget nor need to be reminded one might read a book or listen to a story or a sermon from some mountain high pulpit the only ammo words from the ambo the proclamation of peace forgetting and forgiving and beginning anew anow anext nonesuch a short war nor sudden but a long time coming but quickly a long time gone. And one can still be happy and make love frequently all the niceties of holding back of undressing in the dark of politeness even one might call it politics the gradual coming together of sides to reach some mutually beneficial conclusion.

    And some can’t don’t won’t forget keep a coal burning in their chest and must shave a head or two of vulnerable conspirators in the middle of a street amid the ruins of buildings and trains come and go and one dreams of being on one travelling light toward a new light and a new city indeed a new country far far away maybe meet one’s spouse not yet discovered and a new life away meantime every day one scrounges for food and fabric and spends time mending and fixing and forgetting and remembering while new debts pile up it’s necessary to forge alliances with one’s leftover friends and share space.

    And of course the plot thickens as it is slowly stirred the scarcity of punctuation the beginning of all those paragraphs beginning with And and how long can this go on like this 562 pages of course not nearly as long as four years fighting and four more on top of that trying to remember you might begin to realize the relation-canoe a dory for two not even close to a ship the pauses for a bite of anger to unfold into an argument and a fight and as it simmers to remember it doesn’t have to be like this and the remonstrances of invisible fearful ghosts you know when they’ve come into the room it might be the middle of the night or in bright daylight some passing pause and then the blank stare and up and down the stairs they go the kids in tow and begin again to care and find hope even to sew new clothes and pose and take and develop photos and eat chocolate and dance.

    And how do they survive a war of such magnitude left on their own to forage memory create what did not happen remember what did and did not reinvent and as the great lies unfold they too grow into truces and truths anew told as only a survivor could tell with lies and truths intermingled in a slough stew. And it is an existential mystery novel as essence of life is denied an effect of war on everyone and all so affected must now decide who and what they are or want to be and how to carry on.

    Three exceptional novels with soldiers returning home from WWI:

    Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier (2019). Translated from the Dutch by David McKay, New Vessel Press, 2025. 562 pages. In my post above, I’ve tried to stylistically mirror Daanje’s technique in her book of polysyndetic stream – in lieu of a traditional book review. Anjet’s flow of prose feels at times restless but invites treading water while going with the tide.

    Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918). 100 years before Daanje’s book, like Daanje’s book, it also features a soldier returning home with amnesia, or is he simply on leave, his return both a coming and leaving. West wrote her book in 1916, the war still on and in some of its darkest days. Penguin Classics (1998). 90 pages.

    J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980). New York Review Books Classics (2000), with an Introduction by Michael Holroyd. Here the soldier would like to forget, but can’t, and takes a job in a country church for a summer working from a scaffold uncovering what appears to be an old mural, while another veteran works nearby but underground. 135 pages.

    I briefly mentioned those last two books in a prior post here.

    Three Novels of WWI stacked with spines forward resting on a short shelf of unrelated books.

  • A Complete Thought

    Inching along now, word by word, not a complete thought in sight. Did have one once, a complete clause, gave me pause, didn’t last long, a mere utterance. Must move along, a kind of proposition neither true nor false. Paddled through the kelp around the point. Each wave a fragment of fancy, a figment of you know what. Nothing here, nothing there, may a touch of wit be with you.

    Cartooned, too, motionless, almost, like a cartoon, barely enough. Threads. And beads. Even dismissal doubtful. Traveling light, stuff in storage, if you can call a household holding an industrial trial. Like paddling, nautical, head above water. Jarred, not stirrage, as in shaken, not stirred. Vespers as what light there is fades. Etymology: the evening star. Vespertine. And after night, matutinal.

    Dawn and songbirds. Bees swarm the morning glory gold trumpets. Swallows and swifts dash the morning cup of black bitter coffee the paper cup. From vespers to bitters. While still cool. Morning lasts until noon. Why morning works best: allows for song to carry along no distortion from wind or the noise of other animals. Work and the sounds of work opening, the pulling on of gloves, the squeak of toolbox hasps, the last of the dew spots on the sidewalk and the rolling out of the blueprints on the makeshift table on the sawhorses.

    A wet sidewalk and street closeup with letters in the cement curb that read "Work Projects," and an "A," so part of "Works Projects Administration," from the Great Depression years.
    SE Belmont, 16 Jan 2016

  • Good Friday Pizza

    Another April, another spring, perhaps (like a hand, e. e. sd) another poem (for April is Poetry Month, as if you needed a reason for being) to add to the pile of last year’s leaves still unraked yet to be submitted to the compost bucket. Is poetry yard work? Pots on the porch stuffed with oregano, thyme, rosemary. A pot in a windowsill catches some sun and the King of Herbs is brought in to the studio apartment and clipped for a sauce of solitude, basil on the rise for an Easter souffle. The sun also rises this Good Friday just a bit farther to the north, on the other side of the pine, inches past where it rose just yesterday. Basil is a commodity; poetry lacks fungibility – you can’t one for one swap a poem out for another, but you can cut a basil leaf in half. Maybe many a poem would have been more commodius cut in half. Basil Aristotle. Different kinds of basil: Sweet Basil, Thai Basil, Lemon Basil. Lime-green to chartreuse – now there’s a word waiting to be put into a poem, if not into a pasta sauce. And the smell of a pizza parlor when you first walk in, the chef tossing a flour pie up to a target on the ceiling, never quite reaching it, spinning and flopping like a playdough frisbee, ductile and malleable. Slide it into the big brick oven and soon it will be a friable disk. I sit and wait for one of the cooks to call out “Pizza for Joe!” And I’d rather have a piece of pizza than a poem. Though Spring is perhaps like a pizza thrown by hand and fingers sprinkle on the toppings, like adjectives, sundried tomatoes, green peppers, anchovies, mushrooms, bacon bits, green and black olives, pepperoni, sausage, barbecued chicken bites, pineapple rings, jalapeno slices, provolone cheese, mozzarella cheese, aged cheddar, pepperjack, parmesan. Ricotta, fontina, gorgonzola. Crispy crust, thick red sauce, garlic and herbs – basil leaves piled high! Raise high the roofbeam, Pizzaioli! I’m taking it home. “Pizza to go for Joe!” I carry the big heavy hot box out and put it in my red wheelbarrow and walk it home where they are all waiting for the Good Friday Pizza Feed.

    Image

  • Belogged, befogged, and begoggled

    This Spring Mars springs from the spoils
    of winter ruins and sends a motorized
    snake down the clogged sewer shaving
    the random roots obstinately finding
    like foraging ants every tiny fissure
    in a friable underground infrastructure.

    The flowers Mars forces the mad dog
    tramples frothing spittle quick nimble
    and legs akimble on a first clear warm
    day with her slimy green tennis ball
    tossed to fetch tossed to fetch tossed
    little daylilies looking a bit bedraggled.

    The dog’s form holds Spring’s unfolding
    and stays true to its arbitrary erratic
    no man’s land of free yard garden room
    where the dogs come and go speaking
    of portobello and Punchinello.

    A march hare muddles up straw
    hatted mushing spring riddles
    that scare off common readers
    until Mars springs now forward
    and the dogs are late for work.

    The gold movie lion his iron stare
    and lush loamy mane says Augh!
    roar from which the lambs retreat
    but Leo did not bellow for peace
    bells pealed the turn of the Hun.

    And now this ruddy Spring heralds
    with reels and boisterous calls
    to protect the sprouts from passing
    rituals another year gone belogged
    befogged and begoggled.

  • Seasonal

    Mars plants flowers
    against winter sewer
    ruins
    comes in colors
    homeward

    Mad dog out tramples
    augh spring sprouts
    runs quick and nimble
    clouds and loamy
    hugs a lush ball

    Mush awake a March hare
    argues mad lion movie stare
    retreats lambs
    clear Leo does not roar
    he turns away the Hun

    Many a time change
    and the wind chimes
    reels boisterous calls
    another year belogged
    befogged, begoggled.

  • Punctuation (Sunday Cartoon)

    A hand-drawn cartoon featuring a red stick-figure exclamation point with blue eyes facing off against a question mark. Both characters have arms and legs and are balanced atop small balls. The question mark’s curve forms a large, open mouth, appearing to speak or shout back at the exclamation point.

    “Why do you ask so many questions!”
    “Why are you always yelling?”

    Adorno’s Features of Punctuation1

    We may have been taught in Grammar School to see the comma as a pause and the period as a stop, the comma a quarter note and the period a whole note. The semicolon a half note? The hyphen a rest. The dash a recess, the open parenthesis time to go home.

    Adorno, in his essay titled “Punctuation Marks,” stops to consider a comparison to traffic signs:

    “All of them are traffic signals; in the last analysis, traffic signals were modeled on them. Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call a halt.”

    But Adorno quickly moves on to a consideration of punctuation as a kind of musical notation, but what then, he questions, becomes of that comparison when modern music begins to ignore tonality.

    Of the exclamation point, Adorno gets historical, calling its use an example of expressionism:

    “…a desperate written gesture that yearns in vain to transcend language.”

    As for the dash – well, it no longer comes as a surprise:

    “All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.”

    Why Adorno limits quotation marks to words being quoted suggests a fondness for rules that will always “call out” to be broken.

    “The blind verdict of the ironic quotation marks is its graphic gesture.”

    The loss of the semicolon Adorno attributes to market surveillance, not that anyone was looking anyway, but the use of the semicolon is perhaps the most difficult punctuation mark to establish conformity; the semicolon is the most personal of punctuation marks. It’s gone the way of the tie.

    For Adorno, the test of a writer’s punctuation proficiency can be found or proven in how one handles parenthetical material; interruptions to the lineal flow of thought, which of course isn’t lineal at all, which is why we need punctuation. He uses Proust as an example of a writer’s need for parenthetical expression, where simple commas won’t do, because we are running on but actually stopping, without coming to a full stop, to check our shoelaces.

    Interesting, even surprising, maybe, is that Adorno does not compare punctuation marks to editing in a film. Adorno disapproved of movies, jazz, and advertising, the sleep inducing drugs of what he called the cultural industry. Advertising makes enormous use of the exclamation mark, yelling and fist banging, even in ads without words – it’s the threat that numbs.

    How does Adorno conclude in such a way that might be helpful to a writer either concerned over “correct” use of punctuation (incorrect, Adorno would say, that use of ironic quote marks; but it highlights – calls out – the irony of the rules as a kind of code, not code as in writing computer code, but as in work completed and awaiting inspection), or of wanting to use the tools available effectively, precisely, but at the same time creatively, interestingly?

    It might come as some degree of solace to the punctuation befuddled writer (although some might feel worse) to know that Adorno considered all writing subject to an unsolvable “punctuation predicament”:

    “For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible.”

    1. Adorno’s essay “Punctuation Marks” is included in “Notes to Literature: Theodor W. Adorno,” Columbia University Press, 2019. ↩︎

  • Electric Waterfall Guitar

    An abstract long-exposure photograph of light streaks cascading vertically like water. Blurred, luminous white, orange, and blue lines flow against a dark background, created through intentional camera movement.

    35 mm slide taken with my Exakta 500 in 1969: An abstract, long-exposure photograph of lights vertically flowing in the foreground with squirrely lines of blue and orange streaks in the background created through intentional camera movement.

    The Jimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced” album (1967) included a song, “May This be Love”:

    “My worries seem so very small
    With my waterfall
    I can see my rainbow calling me…”

    Turn the photo horizontal and we see an electric guitar effect.

    An abstract long-exposure photograph of light streaks horizontally creating a guitar strings effect over blurry, luminous white blue and gold lines flowing against a dark background, created through intentional camera movement.

  • Q & A

    giant red quote bubble drawn face-like with frown, tail toward speaker at podium in front of empty chairs, Q & A handwritten at top.

    why ask? ill said
    naught he? nowhere

    that said? what said
    just this? this whose

    unthrilled? feel so
    said I’ll? be later

    even so? what now
    then again? nil wind

    adversative? when to whom
    conversative? with to which

    adjourning? now here
    heretofore? to where

    in room? ill lit
    elbow? move over

    “Ill Seen Ill Said,” a novella piece by Samuel Beckett, appeared in the October 5, 1981 issue of The New Yorker magazine, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in Paris, earlier in ’81. My poem above, “Q & A,” is a bit of a riff on Beckett’s themes.

    On page 41 of The New Yorker, where the story begins, is a cartoon by Charles Barsotti. The cartoon shows a duck sitting at a desk. The duck wears glasses, is writing with a short pen or pencil on a piece of paper, a phone on a front corner of the desk, a stack of three pieces of paper on the other corner, the duck looking up, as if thinking of what to write next. Above the duck, still in the cartoon frame, the words: “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” And above the cartoon box, a handwritten caption reads: “THE CALL OF THE WILD.”

    There are 77 question marks in Beckett’s novella, including: “What the wrong word?” Just before, “Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”

    Why sad? Why wit? Rye whit. Why wry. Wary. Worry. Weak wreck.

    Near 8,000 words to the novella. I counted only 3 commas in the entire piece. Short, staccato sentences.

    We hardly see anything of reality’s totality (“Ill seen”), but that is our syllabus, and even that may seem overwhelming, and suppose we could see it all, could we describe it (“Ill said”), let alone explain it, and with only 0.000375% commas! All that said, we sometimes seem to come close, or someone does, and shares, and that’s a pleasure. Not an argument, not a theory, not a grammar, just a pleasure, like at a circus.

    Beckett’s piece ends with, “Know happiness.” No end of playing with words.

    “Which say? Ill say. Both. All three. Question answered,” says Beckett, in “Ill Seen Ill Said.”

  • Night and Day

    Sunday mornings, I fill our little blue watering can at the kitchen sink and walk around like a waiter at a cocktail party, offering drinks to the houseplants. In our first place together, we sprouted plants from avocado seeds. One spread from a ceramic pot on the ledge above the sink, the window never closed, where the cat Freely came and went. Oak Street.

    One day, each of us carrying a bag of groceries, walking home down Main Street, we paused at the Realtor’s window at the end of the commercial strip to look at the photos of houses for sale in town. We lived in one of four small white stucco houses, one in each corner of a courtyard, a wooden barn-like garage out back with four open stalls. Our rent was $95 a month, the beach a mile away.

    Standing at the window of the Realtor’s, I was surprised to see a photo of our place. The four house lot was for sale. We didn’t have a telephone, so I went over to my folks-iz home and called our landlord, who confirmed our house was for sale, sold, actually, and he just had not had the heart to tell us, but the eviction notice would soon be in the mail.

    That summer, the four small houses were torn down and a large apartment complex with no yard space erected, but this little story is not about inflation. It’s about night and day, dancing the night away, surfing in the morning.

    An inscrutable yawning moon rolls her eyes up over two stick figures dancing over the ocean waves at night.
    A frowning sun looks down on two stick figures dancing over green ocean waves, under a blue sky.

  • Guitars (Sunday Cartoons & Marginalia)

    Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.

    Red guitar outline with text tooth pick and guitar pick.
    yellow outline of guitar on blue field
    squiggly black pen outline of guitarist
    distorted guitar angled with text b3 5 b-7 and 9
    Smiling guitarist wearing blue bowtie and holding blue guitar
    Frowning guitarist wearing a polka-dotted bowtie holding blue guitar.
    Yellow figure next to five strings, the sixth string he's wearing as a tie
    outline of guitar on light blue field
    Notebook page of six string banjo with two surreal characters on page and text reading "Mr Guitar plays banjo"
    Guitar in front of house porch with woman and man in foreground.

    “they brush         
    The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
    With richness”1

    “And that’s life, then: things as they are,
    This buzzing of the blue guitar.”2

    “What slight essential things she had to say
    Before they started, he and she, to play.”3

    “Useless
    to silence it.
    Impossible
    to silence it.”4

    “I opened its lid and saw Joe
    written twice in its dust, in a child’s hand,
    then a squiggled seagull or two.”5

    1. “Spring” Gerard Manley Hopkins. ↩︎
    2. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Wallace Stevens. ↩︎
    3. “The Guitarist Tunes Up” Francis Cornford ↩︎
    4. “The Guitar” Federico Garcia Lorca ↩︎
    5. “The Black Guitar” Paul Henry ↩︎

  • Fore!

    >Sploof!

    backspinning
      
    ●
      
    high and straight

    but short and

    Kerplunk!

    . . . . .

    Green in center with ladders and clubs and golfers around in a confused design of squiggles.
    Man wearing shorts holding blue golf club on putting green with green flag, the word Golf handwritten at bottom.
    Palm tree, yellow sun in blue sky, green fairway, two golfers, one blue, the other yellow.
    Blue horizon line like ocean with palm tree in center of orange circle.